My new book – The Shaftesbury Miracle

The Shaftesbury Miracle

“How the f%%k are we gonna get Jesus a passport?”

Meet Beamer. He and his best mate Dave live in Belfast. It’s 1993 and everybody’s drunk and stoned. One night a guy shows up at their door, desperate for a place to stay.

Meet Jesus Christ – the Son of Man needs to lie low.
A corrupt Heaven wants him upstairs, so The Vatican send bounty hunters. If they get their hands on Jesus… well… there’ll be much gnashing of teeth on Earth.

Meet Katya from Belarus…and Sergei, and Agnes-Marie, and Bob & Doug the vipers, and Inspector Whiteside, and PJ the knicker-thief…Meet Sprout the spide, and the Brits and the RUC…Meet a local crime lord from the telly. Some of them want to help Beamer spirit the Holy Spirit to safety.

Some don’t.

Others…haven’t a baldy.

I’m gonna lay it down, balls-out shameless: read The Shaftesbury Miracle. It’s easy going. It’s funny. It’s stupid. It’s a window into the world of a lapsed Catholic stoner from Downpatrick, with an overactive imagination.

If you’re with me on Facebook and Twitter, you’ve probably been rolling your eyes for the past six months or whatever, reading my updates:

This is my third full-on book publication, and I’ve learnt this: shut up Leif.

But in my oh-so-excited defence, I’m fuckin dead-proud of this book. I could shout it from the top of every County Down drumlin: “This is me! This is my dead-good book, and when you read it, it actually sounds like me, a mildly unhinged but ultimately well-meaning wanker, and I don’t care what anyone says, because this one feels real!”

This book is totally a winner. Well okay, that’s what I thought about my last one, The Olympias.

The Olympias – a few people I know really liked it. A few people I know got their hands on it, and they never said anything about it. A few journos flat-out ignored me after saying ‘Yeah, send me a press release.’ I had visions of them doubling over with laughter – and then cleansing their eyes with Jeyes Fluid. I guess I don’t blame them. When it came to trying to promote that book I was like… “I don’t want my mum to read it.” (It might not be a winner, but I still love it.)

Hell, maybe The Shaftesbury Miracle is emergency toilet paper, but I feel something this time round, something I totally didn’t feel last time: pride in my god-damned book.